


Sunlight

by bunnypirate (evil_bunny_king), evil_bunny_king



Series: Salt Water [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: And its many forms, Canon Compliant, Claude POV, During Timeskip (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), F/M, Falling In Love, Home, I have many feelings and all of them are GOLDEN (deer), Post-Canon, Post-Timeskip, Pre-Canon, dealing with grief, love poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23861560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/bunnypirate, https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/evil_bunny_king
Summary: Love as an act, a choice; that is how he will love, Claude decided that night. He will decide to love, or not at all. He won’t be snuck up upon, like a thief in the night. He will not let go.--Prompt: we're gonna see our boy fall in love, and hard
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Series: Salt Water [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1747756
Comments: 43
Kudos: 163
Collections: The Golden Gifts - Claudeleth Fic/Art Exchange





	1. Poetry

**Author's Note:**

> So this is just a thank you gift for the wonderful @shamanium! It got a little... larger than I'd intended haha
> 
> Additional prompts: the song 'It's you' by Ali Gatie, and a bunch of Shamanium's wonderful art which I'll be linking to in the relevant chapters ;D

There was a line that Claude had read once, in a book of poetry he’d picked up in a trade town in Goneril during the long journey past the throat to his grandfather’s house. The stall had been at the edge of the market, not quite tucked away: an old table brimming with books and a simple awning, angled over the table to protect the covers. The seller had been an older woman, her hair the same colour as her sun-worn skin. Her deep-set eyes had smiled as he’d approached.

“A romantic, I see,” she’d said when he’d pick up the book.

He’d laughed and said something back, he doesn’t remember what; probably something coy. They’d still been close enough to the border that with each town he passed he found more hostile gazes, comments, hurled after him instead of the stones that might’ve come if it wasn’t for the ducal entourage. But her smile was open, honest. He’d stayed there a while, browsing the books, spiting the impatience of the locals and his guard and just enjoying conversation, after weeks of words thrown into the void.

The book of poetry had been warm when he’d opened it, the leather cover breathing in the sun.

 _Why is the measure of love loss?_ he’d read.

“It’s sad,” had come the woman’s voice. He remembered something of her expression when she’d said it, the way her dark eyes had seemed deeper, warmer. “Sometimes the best stories start that way.”

The line had stuck with him, after he’d paid and allowed himself to be towed away to an inn. As they’d moved onto the next town and then the next, a great knotted thread that wound Claude in ever closer and closer to Riegan territory. He read the book cover to cover in the evenings, scrawling notes into the margins. The poems in the book itself were a mixed bag - some insipid and shallow, while others were enough that he spent one evening folding tears into his handkerchief.

He always circled back to that first thought: _ why is the measure of love loss. _

To have, and then have not. To realise the extent of what you have, only once it’s out of your grasp - it’s a classic tragedy and all too common, if the fodlan love of chivalric romances were anything to go by.

Claude, Khalid, was very familiar with loss.

But he was also familiar with great love. He’d seen love that crosses continents. He’d seen love that crafted its own fate, building a home and new life in love’s name and so love - love was something he knew you worked for. That you fought for, when it mattered; to _make_ it matter. 

Love as an act, a choice; that is how he will love, he’d decided one night. He will decide to love, or not at all. He won’t be snuck up upon, like a thief in the night. He will not let it go.

\--

The Monastery is another beast entirely.

The institution of the church is a behemoth, many armed, many mouthed. He wraps himself in cotton and brocade, so much thicker, heavier, than the silk locked in a trunk in his room. He arms himself with his smile and prepares to fight - gathers allies and drinks in knowledge like a man stranded at sea.

He gains people: comrades in arms, a forced amity that becomes classmates that becomes friends, wearing away at his harsh edges. 

He gains _Byleth_.

“Teach,” he greets her in the corridor before class, bumping shoulders. He avoids her hip, where the sword of the creator usually hangs (mountain cleaver, wall breaker, crowner of Emperors and Kings).

“Professor,” he pleads, hanging off of a shovel in the stables with jelly arms. There’s hay in his hair and dust in his teeth, Lorenz sweaty and exhausted beside him. He shoots her a look, entreating, begging and she laughs and abandons them to it - as unfeeling as the day she came here, he mutters under his breath, but his smile betrays him.

“Hey, hey” he says, no, murmurs against the top of her head, and “it’s okay”, but it’s not. It’s not. Her hair is soft and wet against his chin as she wraps her bloodied hands in his jacket. Her tears are warm and quiet. The rain soaks the both of them.

Claude is familiar with loss- but it’s not his own, this time. And he doesn’t - he doesn’t know where to put his hands; his words fail him, his pulse trips in his throat. But he holds her. He whispers into her hair, not sure what he’s saying; nonsense he thinks, and he listens for her ragged breaths under the beat of the storm. He wishes that he could do more. That this was something he had the power to change. 

He only manages to pull her away from Jeralt’s body when the Knights find them. A few minutes more and then Manuela is there, swaddling the both of them in blankets, and instructing him to go back to the dorms, _now_ , and so, he leaves.

He returns to his room and looks at himself in the mirror.

He’s bedraggled, red-eyed. He’s leaner than the boy who arrived here all those months ago, on a fool’s hope of a dream. Older. Maybe even wiser.

He looks at himself and he sees-

Hilda, in the creases at the corners of his eyes. Ignatz in the web between thumb and forefinger. Marianne, in the birdsong he can hear outside his window, chorusing for the approaching dawn and Raphael, Leonie, in the canteen crush that awaited over breakfast. Lorenz over a cup of finely brewed Alymran pine. 

It was chef's choice tomorrow, he remembers - the day Lysithea eagerly awaited each week for the sweets that followed the main course and Claude would slip her extra cakes when she wasn’t looking, watching her astonished delight at their ‘magic’ reappearance. She’d yet to catch him. He was sure she soon would.

And Byleth- 

He looks down at his clothes, soaked through his jacket to the skin. The blood had rinsed through to his shirt, blurred and pink. He strips out of it mechanically, kicking his sodden trousers off too.

Dressed in a dry night shirt and wrapped in his blankets he goes to sleep and thinks - about what he has, what he’s gained, and what he’s willing to lose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Why is the measure of love loss' - Jeannette Winterson, my peeps. Poet of my heart.
> 
> (If not Winterson I woulda quoted Virginia Woolf - see a trend here?)


	2. Lost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please go see Shamanium's beautiful art [here](https://mobile.twitter.com/shamanium45/status/1256817492090970113).
> 
> The third one, with Byleth's fingertips just grazing his chin? Yeah. Yeah. That's this chapter.
> 
> The unofficial name of this chapter is, of course: loss.

In the end, the Monastery falls in less than a day.

Claude remembers the Immaculate One’s scream. The white dragon: as large in life as in the stories Not-Thomas had shared with them once, struggling against the simulacrums sinking their teeth into its flanks;

He remembers the strange light in Byleth’s eyes when she’d pulled him back from the faltering front line, the gash near her temple streaking blood down her cheek and her expression alive, full of feeling, meaning.

He remembers:

_“-Claude.”_

He reads her lips and ducks closer to hear her, stumbling over his own feet, heavy and slow with exhaustion. She clasps his shoulder to steady him, the sword of the creator blazing in her free hand. The student rearguard is shooting their last arrows from the battlements, coughing in the smoke - and they’re losing, he knows; perhaps they always would. They’d fought, though. They are _still fighting_.

Her gaze finds his.

“Claude, I need - I need you to lead the students to Abyss,” he thinks she says (in the flickers of torchlight and thrown magic this could almost be a dream). “Find Dimitri and Yuri; coordinate the retreat. The knights will hold the line for as long as they can.”

Around them the horns take up the call to retreat. Oilsmoke billows over the ramparts, shredding to reveal the approaching Imperial legions swarming through the village ruins. Garreg Mach will never be the same. _Fodlan_ would never be the same - legends walked among them, carving new histories and dredging the old, and the one before him was asking him to-

His hand finds hers on his shoulder and closes around it, holding her there as he catches up to her words.

“My friend,” he starts, the words still new, tender, in his mouth. He smiles, swallowing hard against the fear, realisation, crawling up his throat - that this was an ending, for more than just their student days. There is more he wants to say. There is more he _should_ say, but what comes out is just: “What will you-”

“I will follow,” she says, with a certainty he believes. That he _wants_ to believe. He caves to impulse and folds his fingers around hers, holding on - and he’s surprised as much by her as by himself when she squeezes back.

The horns are sounding, the fires burning, and her hand turns to fit within his.

His heart thuds in his chest, heavy and full.

The wind brings another roar from the battlefield, furious, like nothing else he’d heard in this world (so far). He watches as her gaze loses its focus, her attention shifting. They’re out of time.

She pulls away, turning towards the battle, and he lets her, and feels colder for it.

“Byleth,” he says, despite himself. And: “This is not goodbye.”

She looks back at him and blinks, and smiles.

And then she slips into the artificial gloom, sulphur into smoke.

-

He remembers:

Sunlight hazes through the cloud cover on a spring evening in 1180, ghosting over the monastery and the pages of his poetry book splayed on the grass. It’s before the war, before Byleth even became their professor. Claude lays under the bare arms of an oak taking advantage of the last of the lengthening light. He dog-ears a page corner, thinking about a line.

_Why is the measure of love loss?_


	3. Found

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Strap in folks, this is a doozy. Timeskip ahoy! (I love all of the deer so, so much)
> 
> Some quick notes for my google translated Persian/Farsi - the ones that aren't as easy to pick up from the context:  
>   
> [ _Joonam_](https://www.chaiandconversation.com/2018/azizam-and-joonam-what-do-they-mean) \- link to an awesome article about this, shared by the wonderful Anam_Writes once upon a time. Joonam = my soul.  
>  _Asb_ \- badly anglicised word for Horse. Yes, Claude calls his horse, horse.  
> Sirwal - a name for the trousers Claude wears.

There was a time, many years ago, when Khalid would lay beside his mother in the cool of the palace spring house and his father would feed her fruit, in reward for stories. She'd tell them stories about the great heroes and the gods, and Khalid would dream - about the Barbarossa, and the women who cast fishnets to snare the first stars. Sometimes his father would sing, old stories about the birth of the world. His mother would listen, smiling, turning the words in her mouth with that lilt of hers.

And sometimes, in the quieter hours, when the sun was high and his father was away, she’d tell him about her homeland. The black forests in the north. The mountain range that stretched in the west from sea to sea; the backbone of the world, as she called it; and he imagined a great wyvern, sleeping with its snout tucked into the ocean. The lagoon city she’d grown up in, and how the water would creep into her porch with the tide, the islands sinking into the sea.

She’d tell him about the people.

 _They’re like me, and like you, and like_ baba _as well_ , she said, as she ran her fingers through his hair. _Your uncle is there, and so is your grandfather. I hope… I hope that you will meet them one day._

(He’d wondered about that, even then. They lived so far away. The great Wyvern lay between them)

_What are they like?_

_Tall. Taller than you_ , and she tapped his nose, laughing when he squirmed. He settled, spellbound nonetheless. _Your uncle is brave, and not as funny as he thinks he is. Your grandfather could definitely be funnier._

_Would they like me?_

_Of course,_ and she lay a kiss on his brow. _How couldn't they? And if they didn't, they'll have_ **me** _to reckon with._

(She’d reckoned with Khalid, after his elder brother chased him out of the gardens _\- be smarter if you can't be stronger_ , she's said, crouched before him, expression fierce as she wiped at the bruises on his arms, his scraped knee. _You have to learn to fight your own battles, Khalid. No one else can fight them for you._ )

He wrapped the end of her shawl around his fingers, twisting it this way and that, thinking about a family he'd never met.

_Do you miss them?_

His mother hummed at that. _Well_ , she started, and then she drew him closer, tucking her arms around him. _Yes. Yes I do. And I’ll keep missing them. But that’s okay._ She smiled down at him, smoothing the hair from his forehead before dipping to kiss him and she laughed when he squirmed.

 _You will make choices,_ joonam _,_ she said, when she released him. He stayed in her lap, looking up at her, listening to her against the gentle running of the fountains in the background. _You will make choices, and keep making them, all through your life, and sometimes you might have to choose between one life and another. But despite how it scares you, or what you might lose, you will do it,_ joonam _, and you won't regret it. Because you will realise that you've created a whole new world as a result. One that is just your own._

_And that is no small thing._

\--

In the aftermath of the fall of Garreg Mach, Claude chases rumours. He asks Ignatz, Leonie, to canvas the surrounding region for news; reaches out to Dorothea to send word if she hears anything in her resumed post at the Opera House (as if you even had to ask!, she’d chastised, via coded letter; he could almost hear her rolling her eyes). Days turn to months and then to years and they find nothing. He hears nothing. It’s like Byleth has vanished, like the smoke she’d thrown herself into.

And that absence settles inside him, still and quiet. It waits, for the moments when he’s alone and he opens the cage of his chest and spins it between his fingers, to feel out its measure, eyes burning and numb to the fingertips.

The war continues, grows, and he grows with it. He takes his grandfather’s seat. He’s there when the old man dies - the clouded eyes blinking slow, unseeing, watching scenes and memories that only he can see play across the painted ceiling of the Riegan manor - and with his death Claude feels the circle of the Empire close that little bit more. Claude looks for the church, for the Knights, but they're scattered hunting their archbishop. And just like that, the remnants of the monastery, and the year he’d spent at the Monastery, could almost be a dream.

There are moments when he wonders if he should return home. When he doubts. The Alliance endures and the Kingdom of Faerghus rips itself apart, and it would be _easier_ to slink back to Almyra, tail between his legs. Like Garreg Mach they’re fighting another battle that can’t be won, not as the Alliance is now, even as much as he plans and stalls. In the weeks after the news of Dimitri's execution he schemes into the early hours, reading in his grandfather's study until he falls asleep across the papers and he just dreams of the Monastery, burning. He dreams of Byleth’s hand in his. 

In the end it's a simple choice, made over and over. He ran before. He won’t - he can’t - run again.

The Leicester Alliance endures and he rallies the lords behind him, a family at a time.

He visits Daphnel and Gloucester first - arriving barely announced and delighting in how discombobulated he finds the Count (and to no less a degree, Lorenz). He takes his turns through the grounds, wandering in circuits around the delicately maintained rose garden - and more often than not, it’s Lorenz that joins him. The two of them speak of nothing in particular and it’s strangely comfortable, for the week he spends there. A credit to Byleth and the hours she’d forced them to spend together for stable duty, perhaps, but also… He understands Lorenz a lot more, he finds, in the context of his overbearing father.

Lorenz sees him off when it’s time to move on, riding with him to the edge of the estate - his strangely angular hairstyle grown out almost past his chin and his grey-blue eyes alive with the ride.

He travels to Ordelia, and finally Goneril, in the autumn.

The leaves are starting to turn, the horse chestnuts swelling on the branch and spilling across the path. The horses kick them as they pass. They go south and then finally, they go _east._

He remembers parts of the road from that first journey from the Throat; the blur of villages and small towns. The effort of two years of war is visible now, in the weariness of the buildings and the few people that come to peer out at his entourage as they pass. Claude leads the way, this time. He’d refused the ducal carriage despite the efforts of his grandfather’s retainers - if he couldn’t ride he would just _fly_ \- and they’d given up, after that. _Nardel_ had just laughed.

They stay in inns and way houses and in longer stretches beneath the stars, and the farther they go the more he’s able to _breathe_ again. Away from the crowds of Derdriu, the palazzo, with the wind in his hair and the warm breath of the fall sun and the open road before his feet. His mornings are spent brushing down his horse _Asb_ , sneaking her apple slices. Breakfast and lunch taken in a tavern or on the road, with jerky and dried fruit and bread from the last village they’d passed. Evenings at the campfire, his bedroll or another inn - saddlesore and full and brimming with- memory. The journey reminds him of the familiar chaos of the Deer on the road. The marching songs and cooking disasters; the stories that Leonie had been able to goad out of Byleth about the blade breaker; the way she’d smiled as she told them.

The scruff of pine gives way to the Leicester plains and sprawled on his bedroll in the grass, beneath the yawn of the autumn stars, he thinks about home. Almyra. Of his dreams, pipedream that it was; and the lengths he still had to go.

He wonders whether Byleth had grown up on roads like these. She told him parts when he’d pestered - about a childhood spent in inns and Mercenary camps, of taking to the sword before she could even walk. Her father's diary contained more though, she'd said, more that she’d forgotten, and he remembers being _fascinated_ by that. She was larger than life to him - his head had spun with questions of fate and gods and dreams, like the heroes in his mother’s stories, and it was only when Byleth was _gone_ that he thought to wonder what her lost past _meant_.

He looks up to the heavens and wonders if Byleth is out there, looking up at those same stars. He wonders - if she’s forgotten him. Them. The Golden Deer, the Monastery. That whirlwind year of friendship and sometimes pain.

He hopes that she hasn’t. He _believes_ she hasn’t.

His visit to the crumbling noble house of Ordelia is brief. He secures his retinue in the village, paying their way generously, and when he rides to the castle Lysithea is as busy as ever. Their conversations run the gauntlet from harried joy, promises to share future research to a minor dressing down (why on earth did you choose to ride? At this point we all know you can fly - why not just do it; we could’ve seen you _weeks_ ago-). Her parents, mild-mannered and soft-spoken, eventually manage to usher them all inside, gracefully accepting his gifts (among them recipes from a well known pastry chef in Derdriu). The formal talks go well.

 _I’m glad you’ve come,_ her mother confides over tea one evening (Almyran Pine - Lysithea's doing, he’s sure). Lysithea herself is back in her room, catching up on the work she’d missed during the day when she’d squashed into the study with Claude and her father. _She’s missed you all, you know. We’re happy - that she’s found such firm friends. We’d hoped she would_.

That catches him off guard a moment. There’s something about hearing the feeling put into words. The feeling of almost… homesickness.

 _We’ve missed her too_ , he says more quietly than he’d intended, and Lysithea’s mother nods, obscuring her smile behind her tea cup.

A few days later and again he moves on - turfing his retinue out of the locals inns - and they take the crumbling roads to the edge of Ordelia lands.

They reach Goneril as the leaves start to fall. The estates is a manor house set back behind a formidable wall, far from the fortifications of the Locket, and its gardens and cultivated forests rise out of the plains long before they reach it.

Hilda greets him on the steps and is on him the moment Claude swings from his horse.

Claude wheezes as she tackles him around the middle. There’s a scattering of laughter from the entrance to the house as she hugs him to within an inch of life with that unsuspecting strength of hers, before releasing him just as quickly. He feels his ribs creak back into place.

“You’re a mess, Mr Bossman,” she tells him matter of factly as he straightens, his hands against his sore sides. “And you stink of horse.”

He laughs with the little air he’s managed to regain.

“Good… to see you too, Hilda."

She flaps a hand at him and then primly steps away, directing a more charming smile at the rest of his entourage. He doubts they are fooled. More laughter from the house - her parents advance and the lined up servants watch on, appearing to be a mix of horrified and perpetually bemused.

“Also- _bossman_ , really?” he calls after Hilda, returning to an important point. “You’ve spent _far_ too much time with Judith. She sends her regards, by the way.”

“Impossible.” She grins over her shoulder between greetings, before her expression seamlessly shifts into the beginning of a pout. “Although I _do_ have a few things for you to take back for her, if you could... Mr _Bossman_. It’s on your way, after all, isn’t it?”

He can't quite suppress his returned grin. “...We’ll see.”

He straightens his coat and approaches the house alone - _Nardel_ not present for this trip, acting as his retainer and overseeing the estate in Claude’s absence (to his delight) - and Lord Goneril bows and welcomes ‘the Duke’ to his humble abode.

Subsets of the assembled servants step forward at this, whisking away their horses and belongings, and he sees more than a few curious looks sent his way. He looks back, recognising a few of the brown and olive skin tones and he _wonders -_ like he did in the Monastery, when he’d first met Cyril: about recognition, his double birthright; about the roads that led them to this point.

And then Hilda is hustling him inside, an unstoppable force in and of herself, and he’s swept into the formal ceremonies of the Ducal visit and the life of the Goneril household.

As she sweeps him along, he thinks that this is one of the first times that he’s seen Hilda like this. She seems - comfortable. Her lines bolder. She fills the rooms she occupies with confidence and sometimes even a genuine smile and he wonders - how far this is simply because he’s seeing her at home, and how far it’s not.

This is the first time he’s seen Hilda since the long trek back home after the Monastery fell, he realises.

He remembers those bleary few weeks of _aftermath_ well. How a clutch of the Golden Deer had stayed with Judith in her guest rooms as they tried to reground, to figure out _what next;_ how to deal with the hole in their lives, now that their professor was gone _._

Lorenz had been one of the first to leave, absconded by an armed guard that rode to the very door demanding the release of the heir apparent. And so Lorenz had gone, still pale and shaken, his parting bow slightly unsteady. Then the others had started to slip away as well - Ignatz and Raphael, together, to reunite with their families; Leonie to keep hunting, she said, for all that he’d tried to convince her to stay, to enter his employ, even. She'd write, she promised, and she did - bimonthly, with postmarks from towns across Leicester and with the forwarding address listing an up and coming mercenary company. 

Lysithea, Marianne and Hilda stayed the longest, but in the end it was the famed Lord Holst himself who came to collect his sister. He bundled her and Lysithea into the carriage with the briefest of goodbyes, and whisked them away under full guard.

When he and Marianne had finally departed for the Riegan estate in Derdriu (where Lord Edmund would meet his ward), the great house had felt hollowed out. Judith accompanied the carriage to the edge of the grounds, waving until her silhouette dissipated into the twilight.

They’d all changed, after that.

Hilda catches him looking at her one evening and scoffs.

“I’d watch the bedroom eyes, around here,” she sing-songs, tucking her knees closer to herself. He sputters, almost spilling his red wine over his lap and the plush of the chair. They’re in the reception room they’ve claimed at the edge of the estate, sleepy with good food and good wine. Her parents have retired, their only company the nanny sleeping in the chair by the fire.

Hilda cackles over the mess of thread and chain and cut stones she’s poured into her lap. “I’m not serious, doofus. Un- _less_ …”

“ _No_ , _”_ he manages and she flat out snorts.

“Okay, okay, I’m not that keen either.” She rolls her eyes. “But you’ve got a thousand mile stare, Mr Bossman, and haven’t said anything for at least ten minutes. What’s floating around in that big brain of yours?”

He rolls the stem of the wine glass between his fingers, working the thought in his mind.

“It feels like an age since we were at the Monastery, doesn’t it?” he asks, eventually.

She hums, her fingers working the beads. “It _has_ been over a year.”

“But it feels longer.”

She blinks, and her eyebrows go up. “Wow, what a way to lower the tone, loverboy.”

He masterfully suppresses the urge to flick something at her (he still feels one of his eyebrows twitch).

“Humour me.”

She huffs. “Fine. _Boring,_ but fine.” She knots off her current pattern and starts pecking for new beads. “...I guess. It’s not just the time though, is it? There isn’t even a _Church_ anymore, and soon there won’t even be a holy Kingdom of Faerghus.”

“Exactly.”

She twists to look at him properly, at that, manoeuvring the collected kipple in her lap. He tilts his head, feeling the phantom weight of his missing braid.

“Things change, bossman. We were all going to graduate anyway. We just missed out on the party.” She blinks, slowly, and her eyes catch the torchlight. “But that’s not all you mean, is it?”

He worries at the corner of the book he's borrowed.

"Would she recognise us now, you think?” he says, equally slowly. “Teach, I mean.”

Hilda blinks, and then she laughs. "You haven't changed that much, doofus. I recognised you just fine. Maybe actually grow a little, then ask me again.” His eyebrow twitches and she grins, wickedly. And then her expression softens. “Besides. The professor - wasn't the kind of person to be fooled by fancy clothes or fancier titles. Even less by any rumours that might accompany them.”

 _She_ **isn’t** , he corrects silently. He rubs his face with his palm, suddenly feeling very tired. “Yeah, of course. Of course.”

She tucks her feet closer to herself. “We all change, Claude. We have to change - imagine being seventeen forever, what a _nightmare_ -” he snorts and she grins. “We grow up, and move on, but you’re still _you_. All the more _you_ , if anything. Urgh. Words in the evening. You’re making me use words, Claude. Go to bed already.”

He laughs, again, and heavy as his head is starting to feel, his breath also feels that bit lighter. “Yeah, yeah. You too. You’re the one who’s been making an upside down necklace for the last half hour.”

Her eyes widen, flicking down to the bundle in her hands before she scowls and throws some beads at him (“Claude!”) and he levers himself out of his seat. He almost staggers, the world spinning. He’s drunk more than he thought. 

“Sleep tight,” he says, making his escape with unsteady legs.

She stops him at the door.

“Claude.”

He pauses and half-turns to look at her, still smiling. “Yes?”

“Do you still think she’ll come back?”

She’s lowered the necklace to her lap, her gaze fixed on the fire. When she’s finished speaking she turns to look at him again, her expression contemplative, and ever so slightly sad.

He finds his voice and gives the simple truth: “yes.”

She blinks and nods, and then nods again. “I think she will, too.”

She turns back to her work, dismissing him with an impatient flick of her fingers and he stumbles to his guest rooms through the warm dark of the house, his thoughts, his mind, buzzing, always buzzing.

\--

A few days later Claude enters the library and finds Linhardt lounging in a chair with all the confidence of a well-established guest. When he enters Linhardt leans forward to peer around the chair back, acknowledging him with a lazy blink before subsiding back out of view. His hair looked longer, the front grown out enough to be tucked behind his ears, a few clips training it in place. Otherwise he might as well be the same as Claude remembers from his time with the Deer after he and Caspar had joined: perpetually sleepy, painfully astute.

"Caspar wanted to see the Locket,” Linhardt says to his unspoken question, stretching luxuriously in place. Something in his back clicks and Claude wonders just how long he’s been here, unbothered with reintroductions. “I wanted to see how the Leicester Alliance was faring, in these strange and unusual times. Your approach to this inane war is - interesting.”

“It’s good to see you too, Linhardt.” Claude abandons the books he'd come to return on a reading lectern and come closer, leaning against Linhardt’s chair back. Linhardt sinks back in his seat and flutters his fingers in acknowledgement.

"That too, of course.”

That evening, when they're all squashed into benches in the Great Hall for the final of the immense Goneril feasts, Caspar and Holst embroiled in the makings of a firm and fast friendship, Linhardt crooks his elbow against the table and turns his sleepy gaze to Claude.

"I don't suppose we'll go back,” he says, slowly. The other part of the equation gesticulates wildly with a drumstick, immersed in a rendition of their routing of bandits on the road out of the Empire. Hilda laughs, tipsy and delighted. “If we did we'd get swept up into the war - and quite frankly there's nothing more stupid to waste time or life on.”

Claude accepts a goblet from a passing servant - a young and surely part-Almyran girl, he realises, not older than ten and he remembers Cyril, and the little he’d shared about his childhood. The cost of the wars, and the victor’s spoils and he drinks, watching Linhardt over the cup’s lip.

“What about helping avoid one?” he asks, congenially, and Linhardt glances up at him and smiles.

\--

At length, the week draws to an end and Claude departs from Goneril, bidding Hilda, Caspar and Linhardt goodbye (the latter bound for the locket but promising to ‘swing by’ the capital, and soon). The journey south complete, they head back up towards Derdriu, a wealth of food tucked into their saddlebags and stomachs as they begin the long ride home. Only one of Alliance ‘Great Noble Houses’ remains on the tour - the House of Edmund, Marianne’s adopted father, farther up the Northern coast. An open road awaits.

When they cross back onto the old Kings Road, a few final days ride from Derdriu, he thinks he finds that village he’d passed through, all that time ago - the book of poetry locked in the secret drawer of his grandfather’s desk, alongside his parents coded letters and Byleth’s father’s diary. But as much as he looks, the bookstand is gone and he can't know for sure.

They change out horses for a ship once back in Derdriu and spend the week in the Duke’s northern palazzo, in the shadow of the Kupala mountains and Edmund's hospitality, and then, finally, they trudge back to the Riegan estate.

He’s... home.

He runs his hand along the warm leather of the saddle after he dismounts that last time, gifter of many nights of a sore ass and aching thighs. He slips _Asb_ an apple, stroking the soft velvet of her nose before relinquishing her to the waiting stable hands. He straightens his coat and turns to face the palazzo once more.

A chill breeze is prickling at his wrists where his gloves end, slipping down the back of his collar.

Duke Claude von Riegan, il serenissimo principe, finds his smile and re-enters the Ducal palace.

The winter follows, fitting its fingers into every nook and cranny of the great house, taking hold.

Claude sits in his grandfather’s office and _writes_.

He forges the foundations of a new country with ink, quill and no end of wit; chasing the pipedream he’s harboured inside himself. He writes to his friends, his family - about his day, amusing stories and made up ones, baiting, sharing. He writes to would be allies and enemies as he pleads, manipulates and barters, pulling strings that sometimes feel more like air than anything, and grinning when a gambit pulls off. He tries his hand at poetry. Leonie sends letters of her adventures - infrequent, and still scrawled on flimsy paper that is sloshed with questionable stains more often than not. Linhardt’s hand is much neater, and brief. _Wintering at Goneril_. _Derdriu by spring._

More letters come in - news from the four corners of the country and beyond, rumours of a ghost of Blaiddyd in the north, edicts from the final holdouts in the west of the Holy Kingdom. His father asks after his flying; his cousins ask for more sweets and tea. A shipment of coffee beans arrives just before the first of the winter storms and he could’ve kissed the servant who brought the news alongside his nth cup of tea.

As the nights grow longer, Claude sits at the old oak desk and he writes letters to Byleth.

He’s not sure why, exactly. He'd started writing, and then he keeps doing it and the letters proliferate, filling the secret compartment of his grandfather’s desk until he has to commission a new cabinet for his room.

He rereads her father’s diary and he tells her what she deserved to know: about the monastery and her small family, about herself. He’ll smile and write about the day-to-day - some of the moments he shared in other letters already and some of the ones he hadn’t. He writes to a friend, he realises. His first friend in Fodlan, his closest friend. 'Lost' she may be, or not.

The next year Hilda comes back with him and makes herself at home in the Riegan Palazzo, claiming a wing as a summer house and summoning Marianne with her - the sea air is good for their constitution, she claims (Claude writes about that too). Lorenz himself visits in the spring, without the supervision of his father, even, and they have a pissing match in the garden about the roses (to the amusement of the gardeners). Linhardt rocks up on his doorstep as promised, renting a room somewhere in Derdriu, Caspar not far behind, and as the months pass Claude’s circle grows, sometimes bickering, sometimes at odds, but all the stronger for it.

A year passes, two, and Claude grows a beard. He wears western-style shirts cut from silk beneath the thick Leicester jacket; he dons embroidered sirwal. He spends more time in the Derdriu aviaries with the young Wyvern his father had sent as a gift after his election and now when he visits the ‘Five Great Lords’ - he flies. The letters, the news, keeps coming in. Despite his efforts the Alliance is fracturing - and to keep stability, neutrality, he exploits it. The earful he receives from Lorenz (having ridden to Riegan himself to give him a piece of his mind) is worth it- once he’s calmed him enough to begin to explain, that is.

When he can he sneaks into Derdriu and catches - the bonfires, the carnival. The islands of light and blown glass. There’s trade and people from the four corners of the world, the canals alive with music and food and the markets overflowing - and while there are still problems, poverty, even talk of ghettos, it’s still - a glimpse of how things can be. Of the world he'd dreamed of, that he hoped to build; that he wished Byleth would be there to see alongside him.

He holds on and he plans and he fights, and there's hope. He still hopes.

He wonders - if the others still dream of her.

\--

Time passes, and all too soon, the millennial anniversary of Garreg Mach arrives.

There’s sunlight over the ruins of the monastery when he reaches it, passing green through the ivy. There’s the burnt out Cathedral, the pond, vines slipping through the greenhouse’s cracked panes and into the corridors and the great halls and everywhere he looks, there’s only silence. Dust and silence.

The dormitories are pillaged, as he’d expected, and Byleth’s room is-

He’s not sure what he’d thought he’d find. Perhaps Teach, his professor, sprawled asleep at her desk. Maybe Byleth, his friend, cracking an eye heavy with sleep and a yawn to match. How she’d roll her shoulders in her too big coat. How she’d ask: what time was it, what day is it; she’d been so tired, Khalid; she could’ve slept through the end of the world-

The pieces of the broken-in door crumble underfoot. What remains on the hinges swings idly as he ducks through, boots catching on the moth eaten rug, and he looks at the overturned furniture, the shattered window, the textbook ripped in half, its pages greyed and thick with damp across the floor. It’s her tactics primer, the one she would fall asleep on. She’d carried it around with her like a holy text and actually read it about as much one.

He almost reaches for the book, and then he stops. She’s not here. She’s not _been_ here, not yet, and so, he leaves.

He follows the cracked path back to the bridge to the Cathedral, past the burned out buildings, the open doors to the training grounds. There are bandits in the ruins of the village, and he can see the smoke of their campfires from the bridge, pluming against the sky.

He climbs the Goddess’ tower and looks out over the landscape until it melts into grey-

And there are footsteps on the steps behind him.

 _Tip-tap_ , goes his heart.

He turns.

“Byleth-” her name leaves him on an inhale (and he's dreaming again, he thinks).

He takes a breath, and then another, and she steps out of the shadow of the staircase. The landing of the Goddess’ tower is miraculously unscathed, after the destruction five years ago and the neglect since. Her footfalls are quiet. His heart is beating so hard it feels like it will burst.

“My friend,” he says, louder this time, and his cheeks hurt with the force of his smile.

She crosses the broken paving, her boots scuffing against the weeds winding through the cracks. Her gaze tracks over him, settling on the beard and when she stops he almost reaches for her. To make sure that she’s real, he thinks. To confirm the reality of her by touch, and feel, not just the lurch of his heart.

She looks exactly the same as he remembers, down to her torn up tights, and that shouldn’t be possible. She looks at him - looks _up_ , a part of him triumphantly notes - with shock and _recognition_ , as if he is the enigma, reappearing after five long years.

"Claude," she whispers, with a voice that cracks as if from disuse.

The relief that floods through him is enough to make him weak at the knees but, somehow, he manages to stay upright.

He grins.

“You didn’t think I’d forgotten our promise, did you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kipple.... can you tell I was reading 'do androids dream of electric sheep' for the book club I (accidentally) started?
> 
> This was simultaneously really fun to sketch out (memory and snapshots into the deer just kept flowing, I love them so much) and fairly damn hard to write. Lot of stuff going on in here. Lots of growing (up?) to be done.
> 
> I'm in a zine! Pre-orders are open! Please take a look, the work included is absolutely phenomenal and I love the little piece I wrote for this: [Fodlan Winds pokezine](https://twitter.com/fe3hpokemonzine?lang=en)
> 
> This fic is part of my canon series, by the way; they're all definitely in the same rough verse if you're interested! You'll notice that there are some links emerging (Black Current, I'm looking at you)
> 
> I think at some point I'm definitely going to be writing some of these letters.
> 
> SPEAKING OF - the wonder [Radical Dar drew me this piece of art for the Claudeleth Secret Santa](https://twitter.com/radcrimes/status/1342202911367950338) of Claude sharing some of those letters he wrote during the timeskip and my HEART!!! is so full!!! (writing these letters _now definitely bumped up the to-do list_.
> 
> I have more for this storyline in particular, but it will be a separate piece, as this wraps up nicely. The other name for this story was 'loss'; the other part can only be 'love'.


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